Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs , François Guizot’s histories of the English revolution, and Henriette Guizot de Witt’s women’s history

François Guizot (1787–1874), who served as prime minister under Louis Philippe’s July Monarchy, established himself among his contemporaries as the foremost historian not only of France but also of England, where he took refuge after his ouster during the Revolution of 1848. Already in 1827 he had published a 25-volume collection of memoirs ‘relative to the English Revolution’, including those by May, Ludlow, Hutchinson, Clarendon, and Burnet. While in his introduction to Hutchinson’s memoirs, Guizot praises her as a wife and mother, he also cites her in his multi-volume history of the English Civil Wars. Because Guizot’s histories were published in English translation, his repeated citation of Hutchinson affirmed her authority for the English readership. Henriette Guizot de Witt (1829–1908), who not only assisted her father in his historical scholarship, but also produced editions and histories in her own right, included Hutchinson in Les femmes dans l’histoire (1888). While Guizot de Witt, like her father, praises Hutchinson’s memoirs for centring on her husband rather than more broadly on the English Revolution, Guizot de Witt’s history nevertheless anticipates its recovery in our own time as an important example of women’s political writing in response to civil war

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• Lucy Hutchinson

  Rupprecht Mayer, Robert Mayer•The Seventeenth Century•2007

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• Remembering a Hero

  D Hirst•The English Historical Review•2004

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• Literature and the English Civil War

  Howard Canaan, Thomas Healy et al.•Modern Language Studies•1991

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